Hi,
Long ago in 2006, I put Mark Watkins amazing C program "sympow" in Sage:
http://doc.sagemath.org/html/en/reference/lfunctions/sage/lfunctions/sympow.html
In case you're not a number theorist, this program computes values of
generating functions
attached to symmetric power representations attached to elliptic
curves, and I think it's the only open source
program that does it. Symmetric power representations turn out to be
extremely important in number
theory, e.g., they are used to prove the Sato-Tate conjecture, which
is a major result.
The documentation cited above begins
sage: sympow('-new_data 2') # not tested
So.. it's not tested, and with Sage, as we all know, "if it isn't
tested, then it's completely horribly broken".
I just tried to use Sympow, since it would be extremely useful for
some research I'm doing with Barry
Mazur during my visit to Harvard this week. However, it just
segfaults in both sage-6.10 **and** sage-7.3.beta.
It silently fails when doing the above "not tested" thing, but if you
try it at the command line it segfaults:
-----
(sage-sh) 95d92fa7cb50414ea35d9897eabe44de@compute4-us:sympow$ sympow
-new_data 2
Make data for symmetric power 2
Running the new_data script for -sp 2
Making the datafiles for -sp 2
Rewarping the param_data file
Left with 13 entries in param_data
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
-----
I do have to wonder why this isn't tested. There are no optional
components involved at all.
I probably put the "# not tested" there, and I don't remember why.
I think nothing else in Sage depends on sympow.
So... after some discussion, if there is any, I'm going to recommend
that we remove sympow. There's no point in building, compiling, and
distributing something that doesn't work at all. This just wastes
time and maybe makes the release managers life slightly harder.
-- William
--
William (http://wstein.org)
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